I actually didn’t even notice the casting animation for a while, because it doesn’t show up in Cat form (you can’t cast anything as a Cat, so they have no animations for it). You do still get the spell effect animation (the glowing pink thing around you), though, which I initially just assumed was something to show you were hauling ZK around.
You can spellsteal Elementium Bulwark, but your timing needs to be pretty good. If you steal it after your ranged have dotted themselves up, you can get in a good handful of dps before paralyze and still get broken by your dot.
I hate this fight on my mage. It seems like the only dot I have with a long enough duration that I can be sure it will still be ticking when paralyze comes is Living Bomb, and even then it seems like sometimes it ticks off too soon. I spend too much of the fight at subpar dps because I can’t get enough spells rolling before he pops up the bulwark again. And I’m afraid to use mirror images in case they’re still broken (they used to run off and attack the trash packs in the hallway even if you never agrroed them).
Anyone want to talk about the 4.1 patch notes?
This almost made me do a spit-take:
until I saw this:
Whew!
Also:
It’s Sacred Shield all over again. They don’t seem to like Prot and Ret having too-easy access to good healing spells.
As far as patch notes go, I’m loving the Frost DK DPS changes - no more blood runes (automatically become death runes), buff to Frost Strike, and buff to Howling Blast on single targets.
Oh, and did I mention in-battle resurrection??? 
They’re a fucking mess. There’s a bunch of stuff there that I really hope doesn’t make it to live (which is what people have said about retarded changes before, and then they did).
1.) The Druid, especially Resto, changes seem like they’re going to be a real problem. Giving DKs a BR is also potentially painful for Druids, since it’s once less reason to bring them.
2.) Take away my Shield Bash? Fuck you. Remove my silence with a CD under 30 seconds? Fuck you. Drastically increase the cooldown on my Spell Reflect? Fuck you. All of these are examples of why you should never, ever attempt to balance PvE and PvP play through the same mechanics: it doesn’t fucking work, and it never fucking will.
Hmm, the link I posted doesn’t list all of these; I’ll have to go back to the official site to see what you’re talking abour regarding resto shammies and DKs.
Pummel…
lol esports?
You can replace Shield Bash with Pummel, but it seems you’re losing the silence and buff dispel. And the nice visceral bash sound effect. And the daze and resulting extra threat stuff. Yeah, I don’t get it.
BRez for DKs just doesn’t make any sense at all. Oh, I have a great idea – let’s buff DKs even more!
I wonder if ZA and ZG are going to have their respective mount drops return as rare drops.
Ok having read the official notes, I see why warriors are pissed. And now I see you said resto Druid, not Shammy, so I don’t think I’m confused anymore.
ETA:
Yes, I know that Pummel is being changed to be useable in any stance. However:
1.) Partly, I object from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. I’m a fucking Prot Warrior. I hit things with my shield.
2.) More importantly, Gag Order will not affect Pummel. This means that any caster mob that has access to more than one school of magic cannot be silence-pulled in a timely fashion, because my only silence effect will be Heroic Throw, on a 30-second CD. My only option for wrangling packs with multiple casters will be to LOS them.
1.) There is no dispel on SB. That’s on Shield Slam.
2.) I don’t care about the daze, personally.
3.) The threat off a SB is minimal–it’s never a concern in PvE.
This is obviously a PvP-motivated change, probably relating to the concurrent 4.1 change that will make all non-damaging interrupts (including Shield Bash and Pummel) incapable of missing. It’s just, IMO, an incredibly retarded and short-sighted one.
Eh. The same thing can be said about giving Bloodlust to Mages. I thought that was a good move, as is this. No one class should ever be ‘mandatory’.
How do you figure it’s a PvP change, if no one ever used shield bash in PvP?
Prior to Time Warp, there was only one class with that Haste buff. It was also a class that was only available to one race for one of the factions. That’s an ability that there’s a definite reason to pass out; it’s now available to two classes.
Right now, at least in theory, there *is *another class with a brez that can be used on others (Warlock) and a further one that can brez itself (Shaman). IMO they should just fix the Soulstone mechanic instead of fucking around with giving *yet another *class a brez.
Well, DPS-wise Frost DKs absolutely needed a buff. We’re pretty low on the melee DPS chart right now unless it’s an AOE-heavy fight (and even then it’s no longer as great as it was, with the HB changes).
As far as the BRez, I think it makes as much sense as any other option. Ideally you want pretty much any viable 10-man comp to have access to a usable BRez. Paladin is really the only not-completely-lore-fail option, and they already have way more raid utility than DKs do. I’m just hoping that when you get BRezzed by a DK you come back as a ghoul (but with all of your abilities).
But in the end I pretty much agree with SFG - just change the way spells work in PvP if that’s the problem. Too many of these changes are direct responses to arena imbalance (Lifebloom, for one).
Who doesn’t use Shield Bash in PvP? Every PvP Prot War is going to use it, and even Arms or Fury will use it with macros for equipment-swapping to take advantage of the Daze effect. I’m a bit confused by your question here. Do you think that nobody uses it, which is wrong, or do you think that I think that nobody uses it, which is also wrong?
I really don’t understand Soulstoning (major fail on my part there), but ISTR that you have to pick who to stone ahead of time, right? That’s significantly different from a Druid’s BRez. And Ankh is pretty obviously different as well.
That’s a dangerous thing. City of Heroes changed how powers worked in PVP compared to PVE to provide more balanced play, and it pretty much killed the PVP community. Not only were the veterans pissed off at the changes, but making powers work differently is the very opposite of making PVP accessible to newcomers.
I’m not sure where you guys are right now, so what does “pretty low on the melee DPS chart” mean, exactly? What’s your ranking compared to other DPS specs (especially other melee), and (more importantly) what’s the spread between you and the top and you and the bottom?
That’s how it used to work. It was supposed to be changed to allow the Warlock to apply the Soulstone to a dead player to rez them in combat. Which is currently broken. Which is why I’m saying they should just fucking fix SS, so that we can have two classes that can brez anybody and one that can self-brez, instead of having three classes that can brez anybody and one that can self-brez.